When you think of Annie, you think of a precocious little girl with a frizzy red wig singing schmaltzy songs about being orphaned and hoping for a better tomorrow. And to some extent, that's right, especially if you're thinking of John Huston's 1982 film. But Annie - The Musical shows there's more to it than its rather unkind reputation would have you believe.
Because it's really a story about America in the Great Depression, about how unemployment in the States reached a frightening high of 25% in 1933, the year Annie is set. Families lost their jobs and their livelihoods, many lost their homes and were forced to congregate like gypsy travellers in public parks, cobbled-together shanty towns known as Hooverville. America in 1933 was on the skids - 5,000 banks failed, drought ravaged the country's agricultural heartland, and there seemed to be no hope on the horizon to pull it out of the economic mire. But then President Franklin D Roosevelt was elected to the White House, and his public work programmes helped turn things around.
